War

May 27, 1996|Text by By LUISA YANEZ/Staff Writer

War.

No one who has been in one forgets the experience.

War scars the soul. And the spiritual wounds can take a lifetime to heal. Yet it binds the hearts of those who go. The camaraderie can last a lifetime and beyond. You never forget the friends who died next to you.

So today, as we observe Memorial Day, the ones who made the greatest sacrifice by dying in battle, are honored by the living.

We asked six South Florida veterans of five 20th century wars- World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and Desert Storm- how war affected their lives, and what they recall on this Memorial Day.

Ralph Foster, 101, Lauderdale Lakes, World War I veteran

Bursting with patriotic pride, Ralph Foster put aside his budding baseball career and decided to pick up a rifle instead. The United States had just jumped into World War I. Foster, in his early 20s and trying win a spot with the Toledo Mud Hens, headed from Bowling Green, N.C., to Toledo, Ohio, where he later enlisted in the U.S. Army.

The year was 1917. Movies were still silent and Sigmund Freud had just published Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Assigned to the Army's hospital unit, Foster did human cleanup as American, French and British forces grappled against the Central Powers made up of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.

His job was to scour the battlefields for the dead and wounded. He would follow the cries for help, place the wounded on stretchers and run with them to the safety of an ambulance. Then he went back for the dead.

Today, Foster, one of about 20,000 World War I veterans still alive in the United States, remembers only flashes of his stint in the U.S. Army almost 80 years ago. One memory, however, is still painfully sharp.

"You know when you have a lot of soldiers wounded on the ground, especially at night, all you hear is their suffering and their cries for their mother. They all want their mothers. It's funny. The ones we found we tried to comfort. If you didn't recognize a God when you went overseas, you did by the time you came home."

Foster returned home in 1918. He married and became a gas station owner. The widower will turn 102 on July 1.

On this Memorial Day, "I think of all those friends and young men like me who didn't make it. I saw athletic men, full of life, die there, and I thank God that I was lucky and that I have lived this long."

Carmen Bozak, 76, Plantation, World War II Women's Army Corps veteran

A year out of high school, having just landed a clerical job in the U.S. War Department, Carmen Bozak decided to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, later known as the Women's Army Corps, or WACs.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, Bozak was among the first contingent of women sent overseas in January 1943. In Algiers, North Africa, she was a teletype operator in the signal corps, sending coded messages to the front.

"They were secret messages, so I didn't know what I was sending. It could have been very important stuff, or not so important," she says.

Also stationed in Algiers was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding general of the Allied Forces in Africa, whose headquarters were at the St. George Hotel.

"Eisenhower loved the WACs," Bozak says. "I used to see him around all the time."

Eisenhower's presence made the area a favorite target for air strikes, she says. "What I remember very vividly is the air raids we had when we first arrived in Algiers. We would have them two to three times a week. They were terrifying. One day, they dropped a bomb just about 10 blocks from the St. George Hotel."

In 1945 she returned home with an eye infection and was sent to a Veterans Administration hospital in Valley Forge, Pa. Ted Bozak was there recovering from serious wounds.

"We met, fell in love and got married in 1945," she says. Her husband remained disabled for most of his postwar years, and he died in 1991. The couple had three children.

This holiday brings back memories of her husband and others who served their country. "On Memorial Day, I usually think about all those soldiers I saw when I stayed at the VA hospital. How some were so badly burned and how much they must have suffered."

In 1989, Bozak founded the WAC Veterans Palm Tree Chapter 84. (The group meets the first Saturday of every month and is looking for new members. Anyone interested can call Bozak at 1-954-846-1083.)

Jeff Jeffra, 77, Davie, veteran of World War II, Korean and Vietnam wars

Jeff Jeffra likes to say he entered the U.S. Navy as a wide-eyed kid and left it an old man. "My father said I would never last. I proved him wrong," he says.

Serving 32 years in the service - from 1937 to 1969 - Jeffra saw action in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Which was the worst? "Vietnam," he says. "The fighting there was ugly."

Jeffra says he joined the Navy just as war was erupting in Western Europe. "It's the same old story: I wanted to see the world," he says.